I’m sure no one cares about the trials and tribulations of swapping two chapters and splitting another one into two. I did it and I don’t care about it. It was tedious and annoying. I need to look into writing tools.
That split infinitives are considered an English grammar error is a hold-over from the “everyone knows Latin” days. In Latin (and most Romance languages), one cannot split an infinitive. It’s simply not possible.
In case someone doesn’t know: An infinitive is the “to” form of a verb. “to love”, for an example I still remember (45 years after Latin class). In not-English, that’s a conjugation of the verb. There is no explicit “to”. “amare” is “to love”. “amo” is “I love”, etc…
A ‘split infinitive’ is just stuffing something between the ‘to’ and the verb. ‘to deeply love’, for example. There’s no particular reason not to do that. It just makes the poor people who are used to conjugated verbs unhappy because they cannot.
Does he have a point? Why, yes, he does.
I’m now at the “re-read the whole thing” phase and this sentence ‘sounded’ strange:
He ate the last prairie dog, trying to both keep the blood in his mouth and not think about what he was doing.
First, get past the admittedly strange content. Now read it, again.
The “to” after “trying” is “to keep”, split with “both”. Then it reaches way down to also become split with “think” and then split again with the “not” in front of that. That’s not a split infinitive. It is a bludgeoned-to-death infinitive.
Fixing it results in:
He ate the last prairie dog, trying both to keep the blood in his mouth and not to think about what he was doing.
This is a case where it makes a difference. It’s the first time in my life I’ve actually cared about a split infinitive.
You probably still haven’t reached that point. Good luck on your grammar journey!
And how about another failed cover picture. It will distract me from all the tedious lat/long coordinate tracking I’m doing.
This is from when I was generating them as squares. To make a cover out of that, the right and/or left edges need to be cropped. That ruins it. It could also use more color and Tom’s not black.
Marked Up 